Toan Hoang

Tableau QT: Half-Circle Timelines

Toan Hoang

This is a tutorial that has been requested a few times, so as a quick tip, we are going to walk through the creation of a Half-Circle Timeline in Tableau in 10 minutes or less.

Note: This is an alternative type of data visualisation, and sometimes pushed for by clients. Please always look at best practices for data visualisations before deploying this into production.

Data

We will start by loading the following data into Tableau Desktop / Tableau public.

OrdersDownload

Note: If you have Tableau Desktop, you can use the Sample data source, but if you are using Tableau Public, download and load the following data source.

Once your data is loaded into Tableau, right-click on the data source and click on Edit Data Source… with the Data Source Editor open, paste the following:

Path
0
180

You should get an error as there is no joining column, however, click on Add new join clause, go to Create Join Calculation, type 1 and click OK. Do this for the right-hand side as well. Ensure that you have Inner join selected and you should see the following:

Note: we need additional records as we are going to be drawing lines and using densification to get more points on our canvas. For more information, check out our article on Data Densification.

Calculated Fields

With our data set loaded into Tableau, we are going to create the following Bin, Calculated Fields:

Path (bin)

Index

INDEX()-1

TC_Sales

WINDOW_SUM(SUM([Sales]))/2

TC_Year

WINDOW_MAX(MAX(YEAR([Order Date])))

X

COS(RADIANS([Index]))+[TC_Year]

Y

SIN(RADIANS([Index]))*[TC_Sales]

With this done, let us start creating our data visualisation.

Worksheet

We will now build our first worksheet:

If all goes well you should now see the following:

Now we are going to add a line so that we can show the values:

You should now see the following:

Now we will add our final touches to complete our visualization:

if all goes well, you should now see the following:

and boom, we are done! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and as always, you can find this data visualization on Tableau Public at https://public.tableau.com/profile/toan.hoang#!/vizhome/Half-CircleTimeline/Half-CircleTimelines

Summary

I hope you all enjoyed this article as much as I enjoyed writing it and as always do share the love. Do let me know if you experienced any issues recreating this Visualization, and as always, please leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter @Tableau_Magic. Do also remember to tag me in your work if you use this tutorial.

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